March 20, 2026
5 Unconventional Strategies CX Stars Used to Win Over the C-Suite
Getting a great CX idea approved is often harder than executing it. Budgets are tight, executives are sceptical, and “improving customer experience” rarely competes well against a cost-reduction target in a board meeting. The CXM Stars 2026 features several leaders who solved this problem with genuinely unconventional approaches to building executive buy-in. Here are five of them.
1. Hire an Outsider to Challenge From Within
Jackie Dyal, Customer Challenger, Ageas UK
Most organisations protect the C-suite from uncomfortable truths about customer experience, but Ageas did the opposite. The CEO and Chief Customer Officer created a brand-new role — Customer Challenger — and deliberately hired Jackie Dyal with no insurance background, specifically so she could interrogate processes, challenge existing practices, and advocate for customers without the blind spots that come from being embedded in the industry.
Dyal explains: “I was intentionally hired with a fresh, external perspective. With access to all areas of the business, my role is to challenge existing processes, practices and systems to drive continuous improvement for the customer.”
Within nine months, the concept had earned board appetite for expansion, active executive demand for agenda items, and industry interest from competitors wanting to replicate it. Sometimes, the most powerful way to get leadership to act on CX is to create a role whose entire purpose is making them uncomfortable.
2. Take It to the Investors
Giulia Ajello, CCXP, Global CX Lead, Generali
Most CX leaders present to the executive team, while Giulia Ajello took Generali’s CX strategy directly to financial investors.
In 2025, she delivered a global CX programme across 30+ markets, secured multi-year funding and executive sponsorship, and co-sponsored the Group’s new customer portal. However, the moment that shifted the conversation permanently was presenting the CX transformation to financial investors and demonstrating how customer-driven change translates to tangible business value with evidence linked to Generali’s publicly announced RNPS targets.
When investors hear about CX, they tend to pay attention. So, when the board knows investors are watching CX metrics, budget approval for the next initiative becomes a different conversation. Ajello also unified more than 35 fragmented VoC platforms into a single group-wide solution, giving leadership a coherent signal where they’d previously had noise. Coherent data, presented to the right audience at the right level of the organisation, is what turned CX from a programme into a strategic priority.
3. Build the System Before Asking for Permission
Jenn Stephens, Senior CX Leader, Docusign
Jenn Stephens built a working prototype, demonstrated its value, and then got approval from leadership to scale it. The system she re-architected in 2025 collects customer data daily, monitors 20 journey touchpoints, supports predictive modelling, and provides real-time “red alerts” that allow immediate outreach to at-risk customers.
One example shows how she made the business case concrete. The product team couldn’t justify developing a missing feature without commercial evidence. Stephens added a single question to the system. Within a week, she had data showing customers were regularly leaving Docusign’s platform to access that feature on a competitor’s site. The product team now had justification, and the feature got built.
The system is currently described internally as “the gold standard,” contributes to corporate-level OKRs, and directly shapes product and strategic planning. Her method is not to ask for buy-in to improve CX in the abstract, but to build something specific, show what it reveals, and let the business case make itself.
4. Defend the Budget in the Public Sector
Mwendwa Mworia, CX Lead, Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission, Kenya
If winning a budget in a corporate environment is hard, try doing it inside a government body. Mwendwa Mworia spent three years developing a vision for a national Customer Experience Centre within Kenya’s electoral management body, a trust-sensitive organisation serving millions of citizens. In July 2025, the proposal was formally adopted, a cross-functional implementation committee was constituted, and the Centre was launched.
The critical milestone was defending and securing a KES 25 million budget in front of senior management and the Board, a significant financial commitment in a public sector context where CX has historically been treated as administrative overhead rather than strategic infrastructure. Her argument was structural, that fragmented service delivery and siloed information were creating accessibility gaps that undermined institutional credibility. The CXC was an operational infrastructure.
The Centre currently operates with five staff and is designed to scale to over 200 agents during a General Election. CX as infrastructure that flexes with national demand is what made the business case land.
5. Make the Data Work for the Room
Sam Phillips Lord, CX Leader, HSBC
Sam Phillips Lord launched a new CX measurement framework across 15 markets at HSBC in 2025. The thing that changed executive behaviour was the way data reached them.
Rather than distributing dashboards and waiting for leaders to draw conclusions, he simplified the outputs, sharpened the executive narrative, and created targeted insight packs designed to be pulled into decision-making rather than politely acknowledged.
“CX insight became something leaders actively pulled into decision-making, rather than something politely acknowledged at the end of a meeting,” he said.
By connecting customer feedback with operational, behavioural, and commercial data, and then presenting only the analysis that answered questions leaders were already asking, he turned CX measurement from a reporting function into a decision-support tool. As a result, leaders started rethinking investment priorities based on CX insight, and markets focused their efforts where it genuinely mattered to customers.
The unconventional part is the discipline of translating CX data into the language of whoever needs to act on it, rather than the language of whoever collected it.
